Your name in the Torah: in Hebrew letters, as a number, with the verse it lands on and the sources. Computed, not divined. Free.
Your name
You did not choose your name. It was given — almost always after someone who came before you.
Pedro (פדרו) stands in the Torah as a word of its own — 1 time. First in Leviticus 1:12.
The verse of your name
There is a sentence with which, by custom, a person answers when asked who they are.
Yours is this one.
פן תכרת ברית ליושב הארץ וזנו אחרי אלהיהם וזבחו לאלהיהם וקרא לך ואכלת מזבחו
Exodus 34:15
The verse is chosen by the custom: it begins with the first letter of your name, פ, and ends with the last, ו.
The custom is written down in the Kitzur Shelah and in Sefer Ben Zion: “say it regularly and never forget it as long as you live.” The Rokeach gives the reason in Chochmat ha-Nefesh: a person is asked their name, and whoever does not remember cannot answer. The verse holds the name for them. Siddur ha-Rashban puts it more plainly: children were made to learn their verse by heart — so that if they were taken and forgot everything else, they would still know who they were.
The week you were born
Add your date of birth and we will show which portion the world was reading the week you appeared, and whether it holds a word of your number.
How rare this number is
A word with the number 290 appears in 35 of the 54 weekly portions.
You are not alone in this number
The same number belongs to these names:
What is left
We counted your name in one system. There are nine, and they give nine different numbers. When several systems lead to the same portion, the tradition reads that theme as strong. So far you have one.
Below — how this was counted, letter by letter.
Pedro — The customary Hebrew spelling of this name. If your name is spelled differently, correct the Hebrew spelling and the report is recomputed.
פדרו
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is פדרו. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 290 — the same as the Torah word פרי, “fruit”. That number points to Torah page 290 of 354 — in the portion Masei. What that portion is about: The forty-two journeys through the desert; the borders of the land; the Levite cities and the cities of refuge. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Exodus 34:15. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. There are no predictions or judgments here — only the text of the Torah and arithmetic you can check.
Adding up the letters of the name פדרו gives 290.
290
The number 290 is the Torah word פרי — «fruit» (Genesis 1:11).
The number 290, as the remainder modulo 354, points to Torah page 290 in the book of Bamidbar (Numbers). These are its opening words:
כפר לנפש רצח אשר הוא רשע למות כי …
The verse this place falls on is Bamidbar (Numbers) 35:31:
וְלֹא־תִקְחוּ כֹפֶר לְנֶפֶשׁ רֹצֵחַ אֲשֶׁר־הוּא רָשָׁע לָמוּת כִּי־מוֹת יוּמָת
Moreover ye shall take no ransom for the life of a murderer, that is guilty of death; but he shall surely be put to death.
This is from the portion Masei. What it is about: The forty-two journeys through the desert; the borders of the land; the Levite cities and the cities of refuge.
The same number, 290, is given by these biblical names:
צר · כרמל · הדדעזר · מרים
Nine ways of counting
The tradition counts the same name in several ways. The main one is above: each letter is its number. The other eight are old and checkable too; each gives its own number, and many of them have a Torah word with the same number.
Final letters as 500–900 (mispar gadol) — 290. A Torah word with the same number is פרי — “fruit” (Genesis 1:11).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 20. A Torah word with the same number is היה — “to exist, i.e. be or become, come to pass” (Genesis 1:2).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 47. A Torah word with the same number is אולי — “if not” (Genesis 16:2).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 1231.
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 46452.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 738. A Torah word with the same number is שחלת — “a scale or shell, i.e. the aromatic mussel.” (Exodus 30:34).
The word that comes out is וקגפ. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 189. A Torah word with the same number is פקדה — “visitation” (Numbers 3:32).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 1037.
The number 290 appears in the classical books 6 times across 5 works. The earliest mention is פרי עץ חיים שער הקריאת שמע (~1573).
The name פדרו appears in the Torah as a word 1 time. The first time is Leviticus 1:12.
The verse of your name
There is a custom: at the end of the prayer one says a Torah verse that begins with the first letter of one's name and ends with its last. For פדרו these are פ and ו. The Pentateuch has exactly one such verse — Exodus 34:15:
פן תכרת ברית ליושב הארץ וזנו אחרי אלהיהם וזבחו לאלהיהם וקרא לך ואכלת מזבחו
This is from the portion Ki Tisa. What it is about: The half-shekel for the census; the golden calf and the broken tablets; the thirteen attributes of mercy; the second tablets.
Each Hebrew letter has a number; a word's number is their sum (alef 1 … tav 400). The page is the remainder modulo 354: the Torah divided into 354 pages of 861 letters, as the lunar year has 354 days. Everything can be checked by hand.
Биньямин Пичхадзе, «Хумаш 354» (חומש 354), Бней-Брак, 2002 / התשס״ג · A calculation, not a prediction.